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A Just War Critique of the International Community's
Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina Between 1992 and 1995
Susie L. Hoeller
November 24, 2002
© 2002 by Susie L. Hoeller

I. Introduction
This paper sets forth an ethical examination, using the just-war criteria, of the international community’s intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina (“Bosnia”) between 1992-1995. On March 3, 1992, Bosnia, a republic in Yugoslavia, legally declared independence, following in the footsteps of its sister republics, Slovenia and Croatia and on November 21, 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed. In between, there were “250,000 people killed, two million refugees, and atrocities that have appalled people all over the world.”
The just war criteria judge the ethics of war in two ways. Is the resort to war just or unjust (“jus ad bellum”)? Is the actual conduct of the war, just or unjust (“jus in bello”)?

II. “Jus Ad Bellum” Criteria
There are seven generally accepted “jus ad bellum” criteria under which the international community’s intervention in Bosnia will now be considered.

1. Just Cause
To be just, a war must be fought to protect innocent
human lives, adecent human existence and/or basic human rights.

Bosnia’s independence was officially recognized by the European Community (“EC”) on April 6, 1992. On that day, a crowd of 50,000 gathered at the Bosnian Parliament in Sarajevo for peace. The demonstrators were members of Bosnia’s three largest nationalities: Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Across the street, from the top floors of the Holiday Inn (built for the 1984 Winter Olympics), Serbian army and para-militaries fired their weapons into the crowd, killing and wounding dozens. This first Sarajevo massacre contained the elements that would recur in Bosnia countless times. The victims were unarmed civilians who hoped for the preservation of a multiethnic Bosnia that had roots and traditions from the Middle Ages. The killers were nationalist extremists, organized and heavily armed by political and military leaders who were bent on destroying Bosnia’s multiethnic society and replacing it with the national supremacy of a single ethnic group.
The first Sarajevo massacre destroyed the voices of peace and tolerance and replaced them with the bitter shouts of ethnic hatred backed by the force of arms. Many of Bosnia’s Serbs, who had previously boycotted the independence referendum, now went to war against the new Bosnian government and Bosnia’s civilian population.
Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, had earlier warned the Croatian and Muslim members of the Bosnian Parliament:

“you have no way of breaking off from Yugoslavia. Serbs can prevent both Croats and Muslims from leaving. The path you are taking is the path that led Croatia to hell, except that the hell in Bosnia - Herzegovina will be one hundred times worse and will bring about the disappearance of the Muslim nation.”

Karadzic’s prediction proved to be almost true. For four years Bosnia was hell on earth. Today there is no room for doubt that the troops of the JNA (Yugoslav Army) and the Bosnian Serb paramilitaries committed acts of genocide in Bosnia. The International Tribunal for War Crimes at The Hague has issued an indictment of Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb General, and Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia. Milosevic is now on trial at The Hague while Karadzic and Mladic have not yet been apprehended.
The Muslim population of Bosnia would have been completely destroyed, but for the international community’s intervention. I will discuss the specifics of the international intervention under later criteria. It is my opinion that the intervention in Bosnia served a just cause. It prevented a total genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims and Bosnian citizens with mixed marriages.
Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo had a pre-war population of 500,000. Bosnia as a whole had a pre-war population of 4 million. In Sarajevo and in many of the principal towns of Bosnia, the Serbs, Croats and Muslims were highly intermarried. In pre-war Sarajevo, a third of the population was of mixed parentage. (A much higher percentage than what one sees in America between blacks and whites.)
Ten thousand Sarajevans of all ethnic groups were killed during the over 1,000-day siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces. The Bosnian Serbs led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic and supported by Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade wanted to create an ethnically pure, irredentist “Greater Serbia”. Their goal, which was mostly achieved, was to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnia of non-Serbs. The means used were horrific and unseen in Europe since the Nazis: concentration camps, mass murder and rape, torture, burning of villages and slaughter of livestock.
Many commentators during the war and afterwards contended that the international intervention in Bosnia, although it was a just cause, was too little, too late. This is the position of the former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, who has written “the refusal of the Bush administration to commit American power early on was our greatest mistake of the entire Yugoslavian crisis. It wasted the opportunity to save over 100,000 lives.”

2. Legitimate Authority
This criteria means that the war must be conducted as a public undertaking
by the proper sovereign states or international bodies, not by private armies or vigilantes.

This requirement was fully met in Bosnia. The major international intervention was conducted by member states acting under the authority of the United Nations (“U.N.”) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”). There were Islamic mercenaries who fought on the side of Bosnian government but this paper is not concerned with that private intervention.

3. Last Resort
This means that all efforts to avoid violence must have been exhausted before a war can be considered just.

This certainly was the case in Bosnia. In fact I believe the international community should have intervened more forcibly much sooner. But that is the subject of another paper. The international community’s initial intervention in Bosnia did not resort to violence and frankly this strategy was unsuccessful in stopping the genocidal war. However the non-violent intervention did save individual human lives by providing food and medicine to the besieged Bosnians.
Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat who ultimately negotiated the Dayton Accords in 1995, writes that Yugoslavia and its fall represents a failure of historical dimensions. Holbrooke gives five factors to explain the tragedy: a misreading of Balkan history; the end of the Cold War; the behavior of the Yugoslav leaders themselves; the inadequate American response to the crisis; and the mistaken belief of the Europeans that they could handle their first post Cold War challenge on their own.
The nonviolent intervention prior to the successful 1995 NATO bombing campaign (to be discussed later) included many actions: the EC sponsored peace mission of British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington; the U.N. appointment of former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to work with Lord Carrington and David Owens, an EC mediator; the U.N. Security Council arms embargo on all of Yugoslavia; (this was actually a gift to the Serbs since almost all of the arms factories were in Serbia.); the temporary cease-fire negotiated by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter which later crumbled; the deployment of lightly armed U.N. peacekeeping troops to Bosnia to deliver humanitarian aid; and the declaration of the U.N. safe zones for Muslim residents and internal refugees in Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde (all later overrun by Bosnian Serb troops).

4. Declaration of War Aims
This criterion requires a formal declaration of war or at least a public declaration of war aims.

Under this criterion, at least until NATO’s action in the fall of 1995 to bomb Serb military positions, the international community failed. The aims of the various interventions were never clearly stated and any aims that were stated were never consistently upheld. Was the goal of the U.N. troops simply to deliver convoys of food and medicine to starving Bosnians, but then not “take sides” and not shoot back when snipers killed Sarajevans right in front of them? The U.N. declared safe zones were supposed to protect victims of Serb ethnic cleansing and allow internally displaced refugees to gather under the protection of U.N. troops. But this didn’t work as we saw in the horrendous massacre of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by General Ratko Mladic’s forces.
Even when NATO finally started to bomb the Bosnian Serb military positions in 1995, was the aim simply to force the Serbs to stop the war and negotiate a ceasefire or was it to restore Bosnia to a multiethnic society in a unitary state?

5. Proportionality
In the context of the decision to commence war, proportionality means the comparison of the total benefit of the war to the total evil that will come out of it. As wars have become more destructive and total in the modern era, the anticipated benefits must be very substantial for a war to be just.

Stopping the genocide outweighed the evil effects of two weeks of bombing of Serb military positions. Very few Serbs were even killed in the bombing and those killed were in nearly all cases combatants. NATO did not bomb civilian areas in Bosnia or in Serbia proper. This can be contrasted to the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, where hundreds of areas within Serbia itself, including downtown Belgrade were heavily bombed and many innocent civilians (even persons at the Chinese Embassy) were killed in the efforts to stop Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians.
But in Bosnia, the Bosnian Serbs, when finally confronted with air power (instead of diplomacy and lightly armed and ineffective U.N. peacekeepers), quickly gave up their arms and negotiated the Dayton Accords. The Dayton Accords of course are highly controversial, since they partially rewarded the Serbian ethnic cleansing by dividing Bosnia into two parts, the Republika Srpska ( 49% of pre-war Bosnia now controlled by the Bosnian Serbs) and the Bosnian Federation (51% of pre-war Bosnia). Prior to the war, the Serbs were approximately 30% of the Bosnian population. However a detailed examination of the justness of the final peace settlement itself is not within the scope of this paper. The military intervention, which led to the Dayton Accords, was successful in stopping the immediate killing in Bosnia. Seven years later there are still thousands of Stabilization Force (SFOR) troops remaining in Bosnia. There is an uneasy peace in Bosnia, since the refugees have not yet been able to return to their homes and the Bosnian Serb leaders have not been brought to justice.

6. Probability of Success
It is not just to wage a war that has a small likelihood of success. Sometimes an unjust peace may be preferable to an indefinite state of war.

If you measure success by stopping the killing, eventually the international intervention in Bosnia was successful. In my view, however, there was always an excellent chance for success, as was quickly proven in 1995 when the NATO bombing finally took place. General Colin Powell, who in 1992, was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had advised President Bush that it would require the use of 250,000 troops to stop the Bosnian Serbs. President Bush followed Powell’s advice. Powell’s estimates seemed reasonable on the surface, because the fighting in Bosnia was vicious, and under the Powell Doctrine, the United States government, when intervening overseas, needed to deploy overwhelming military force in order to prevail. At that time in Washington, few politicians challenged General Powell’s judgment. Also unlike the 1991 interventionist war in Kuwait and Iraq, the fate of Bosnia did not seem to be a matter of U. S. national interest in the Kissingerian sense.
In 1992, the crucial first year of the Bosnian war, when the Bosnian Serbs gained so much territory (nearly 70% of Bosnia) and killed so many people, Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations was the most prominent advocate for military intervention after Clinton came to power. She was not afraid to speak her mind to Powell while he continued to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Albright asked him, “what’s the point in having the superb military you are always talking about if we can’t use it?”
The Bosnian Serb Army consisted of approximately 50,000 men. They had adequate stocks of small weapons, mortars, artillery and tanks. They were a collection of new, young conscripts and veterans of the JNA. They took what they wanted in the first months of the war when there was no organized opposition to their death squads and heavy artillery. Their principal strategy was mass murder and the siege.
Bosnia’s government did not even need foreign troops to fight its war; it could find plenty of troops of its own, more than 100,000 by the end of the war. What it needed was weapons, since the weapons embargo on all sides had played into the Bosnian Serb hands.
How could the U.N. refuse to protect the Bosnians and yet prohibit them from purchasing weapons to protect themselves? The rationale for the arms embargo was that if you starve the conflict of weapons, the fighting will slow down and stop. In Bosnia, this rationale did not hold, because one side, which started the war, had plenty of weapons, and the other side, which had few weapons and did not want a war was being slaughtered. In fact, the U.N. embargo proved to be immoral because it aided genocide.
The Bosnian Army, (unlike the Kosovo Liberation Army), despite the cruelties inflicted on its civilians did not engage in systematic atrocities when it managed to retake small portions of territory. There were some atrocities but they were not widespread. The majority of Bosnia’s Muslims did not wish to live in an ethnically pure state.
The Bush Administration had refused to intervene in Bosnia, leaving the problem to the Europeans. Clinton, who in his 1992 Presidential campaign had heavily criticized Bush for inaction on Bosnia, then dragged his feet on intervention for two years.
But by the summer of 1995, the Serb behavior in Bosnia simply became too disgusting for Western politicians to overlook any longer. The turning points were the massacre at Srebrenica, followed by a Serb mortar attack that killed thirty eight people in the open air Sarajevo market. At this point, the NATO bombing campaign commenced. It was a very limited campaign with just 3,500 sorties on Serb military targets in Bosnia over 11 days. When compared to NATO’s 78 day bombing of Serbia in 1999 with more than 38,000 sorties, the Bosnian air campaign was mild, yet effective. No lives were lost by NATO and very few Serb lives were lost as well, since most of the targets were ammunition depots and heavy artillery pieces that the Serb soldiers simply abandoned once they knew the NATO air campaign had begun. The Serbs swiftly agreed to the peace conference in Dayton, Ohio that ended the war.
It’s interesting to note that even today many early opponents of bombing insist that they were right and continue to defend their position. Their position was never articulated in ethical terms, it was articulated in pragmatic terms. These people argue that the bombing worked in 1995 because the Bosnian Serbs were weaker militarily than they had been at the beginning of the war and Milosevic was tired of the economic sanctions placed on Serbia. Nevertheless the army that crumbled under NATO’s limited bombs in 1995 was not that different from the army that existed in the first year of the war.
Opponents of bombing noted that NATO’s attack coincided with the summer offensive by Croatian and Bosnian troops that had swept through northwestern Bosnia threatening to overrun its major city, Banja Luka. Would the bombing have succeeded without the ground threats? It’s clear that the ground offensive helped bring the Serbs to Dayton, but the key factor was the NATO bombardment.
What happened in Bosnia, after it was recognized as an independent state, was no different legally than what happened in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded it in 1990. The major difference is that Bosnia unlike Kuwait did not have any oil. Also since the Serbs were the allies of the victorious French and British in World Wars I and II, there was a pro-Serb bias from the beginning in much of the European Community and the United States. This bias was also increased by the fact that, like their fellow Europeans, the Serbs were Christians and the Bosnian Muslims were Muslims.

7. Right Intention
This is the idea that the war must be fought with just cause in mind and even when just cause is present, the purpose of the war may not be unilateral gain to the intervenor. Right intention means the pursuit of peace and reconciliation for all the parties involved.

The international intervention in Bosnia meets the test of right intention. Europe and the United States had little to gain for themselves by intervening in Bosnia (except stemming the flow of refugees). The intervention was driven by humanitarian concerns, all the more pressing with worldwide television coverage. This right intention is shown by the continuing commitment of SFOR and the substantial investment the European community is making to try and rebuild the devastated physical infrastructure of Bosnia.

III. Jus in Bello
Jus in Bello has two closely related criteria: discrimination and proportionality. Discrimination prohibits intentional and direct killings of noncombatants. Proportionality calls for the least destructive means possible for all concerned. The criterion of proportionality is applied within the limits of the criterion of discrimination.
If no harm were ever allowed to come to noncombatants, the practical effect would be to render all wars unjust. At this point the just war theory would provide the same judgments as pacifism on questions of when violence is acceptable, thus making the theory moot.
Thus there is the concept of “double effect” which Michael Walzer discusses in his book, Just and Unjust Wars. “Double effect is a way of reconciling the absolute prohibition against attacking non-combatants with the legitimate conduct of military activity. Walzer provides four conditions under which an act likely to have evil consequences such as (the killing of noncombatants) can be ethically permissible. Walzer defends the principle of “double effect” when there is a “double intention”. The actor is intending to achieve a good effect and any foreseeable evil is minimized, even if this creates a danger to himself.
The NATO air power intervention meets the tests of discrimination and proportionality in most respects. There was clearly discrimination in that only military targets were selected and there was little injury to civilians. The military targets were hit for a short time period. There was no massive retaliation against the Bosnian Serbs, just enough limited military force was used to bring them to the bargaining table. The only criticism that could be leveled was that the use of air power minimized the risk to NATO soldiers, since in fact none were deployed, just airmen flying without much danger from weak Serbian air defenses. The intention was good, it was to stop the killing of Bosnian civilians. There was no intention or action to assist the Bosnian Army to recapture territory or exact revenge.

IV. CONCLUSION
The international intervention in Bosnia was just. Except as noted above, it generally satisfied both sets of just war criteria. It ended the war. Yet the fragile peace has required seven years and thousands of SFOR troops with no clear end in sight. The destruction in Bosnia, both of individual human lives and of the physical infrastructure was so vast, that in my opinion, it will take at least fifty years to recover. The prospects for restoring Bosnia to a multiethnic civil society in a unitary state are daunting. This will not happen until its neighbor Serbia becomes a non-aggressive state. Croatia is moving beyond its fascist past towards integration with the European Community. Slovenia was just accepted into NATO this past week.
I don’t agree with the casual observers of the former Yugoslavia who wrote off all the killing to “ancient hatreds”. Bosnia before the rise of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia was a multiethnic tolerant society. This is evidenced by the very high rates of intermarriage. Pre-War Sarajevo was the Jerusalem of Europe, within walking distance in the downtown, one can visit the Islamic Mosque, the Catholic Cathedral, the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral and the Jewish Synagogue.
The problem remains that many of the best and brightest of the Bosnians have fled as refugees and have resettled in other parts of Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. Their hearts are broken and in many cases their bodies too. Many refugees long in their hearts to return to their beloved Bosnia but they are still afraid. They see the Dayton Accords as merely a cease-fire, especially since the major perpetrators of aggression, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have not been brought to justice.
At the place on the Vrbanja Bridge which crosses the Miljacka River in the heart of Sarajevo, where Muris Zecevic, the Muslim and Vojna Adamovic, the Serb stood together on April 6, 1992, there is a beautiful plaque which commemorates the place where peace ended and the first victim of the war, Suada Dilberovic, a young student from Dubrovnik fell. It reads: Kap moje krvi protece I Bosna ne presusi” - “A drop of my blood flows and Bosnia does not run dry.” An elderly woman comes often to place fresh flowers on the plaque. I saw both the plaque and the fresh flowers when I visited Sarajevo in July, 2000.bibliography
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Donia, Robert J. and Fine, John V.A., Bosnia & Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Glenny, Misha, The Balkans. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Holbrooke, Richard, To End a War. New York: Random House, 1998.

Malcolm, Noel, A Short History of Bosnia. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Mills, Nicolaus and Brunner, Kira, Editors, The New Killing Field, Massacre and the Politic of Intervention. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

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